Bungie enters mobile, social gaming with Aerospace partnership program

We still don't know what Bungie's next game is, but the company has announced …

While Bungie has yet to reveal its next (and first post-Halo) game, the developer has announced a surprising new initiative called Bungie Aerospace, which will see the company partnering up with independent developers to bring games to mobile and social platforms.

Aerospace appears to be similar to the EA Partners program, and will allow Bungie to partner with select independent developers to "give studios the creative freedom and the resources they need" as well as access to the Bungie.net platform and the community that comes along with it.

"Bungie has always been passionate about making and playing great games, regardless of platform," Bungie COO Pete Parsons explained. "Bungie Aerospace will allow us to explore game creation in multiple formats with some amazingly talented teams. Now that we’ve returned to our roots as an independent studio, we are in a position to launch Bungie Aerospace to support, foster, and elevate like-minded, independent developers."

The first announced collaboration will be with Harebrained Schemes, a development studio in Seattle headed by former FASA Studio founder Jordan Weisman. Weisman also previously worked with Bungie on the I Love Bees alternate reality game to promote Halo 2. The studio's first game will be an Android and iOS title called Crimson.

Though the Weisman-founded company Smith & Tinker owns the rights to former FASA properties including Crimson Skies, he told Kotaku that the game takes place in a "different universe with different types of vehicles and so-on."

Seems a pretty solid idea, take their resources, their experience with EA and the fact their name is still much loved and make something big of it. There aren't a huge number of good publishers in the mobile space, but the cost to entering the market is much lower than halo blockbusters.

RIP for yourself I suppose... Jason Jones is still at the helm: until he completely screws up I'll stand by Bungie on this one.

So he has to completely screw up? It can't be a partial screw up like Halo was?

I find it funny how some people can lament the loss of good level design like it has been displayed in DNF reviews and still hold Halo in high regards. Ben Kuchera talked about modern FPS essentially becoming rail shooters -- linear and without depth. That's Halo, buddy, that's Halo right there.

@Doctorb Jay (/yawn at name)Halo was a "partial screw up"? I don't think you understand the meaning of the word. If you didn't like the Halo series for whatever reason your brain comes up with (obv the rest of the world is deluded: the five released FPS versions of Halo have an average Metacritic score of 92.104, with the original getting 95.58%), that's your business. As well, haters do nothing but lament the one level with the repeating hallways and/or The Library, yet totally forget the excellent level design for the entire rest of the game to say nothing of the legendary multi-player maps which have been created and renewed each iteration.

Halo is not Fallout... it is only "on rails" to the extent that you have a mission to complete and that episodic mission terminates at one point. ODST and Reach were hardly an exercise in running down a single corridor and killing anything in sight en route to victory. Let's not forget: Halo (and Halo2) was smooth as butter on the limited hardware of the original Xbox; it only makes sense that the games allow more freedom as the hardware improves and the tools mature, BUT DON'T LET THAT GET IN THE WAY OF YOUR RIGHTEOUS HATE!!! =P

@lophanbusinesswise Halo was a success, but if you look at the history of development of halo 1 and what it was supposed to be, and also take a look at Marathon, you can only regard Halo as a partial screw up.Only two weapons, little to no interactions with your environment, story way behind what Marathon offered (even though it was a copy thereof, a bad one), repeating level design. The visuals and sound were wonderful, but that doesn't make a great game.